Oops…Did I do that? …HELP!

It’s vitally important to double-check and ensure your work is perfect before publishing and sending it out. It sounds like common sense right? Well sometimes we all make mistakes especially in todays busy and stressful world.  However, small mistakes can lead to much bigger problems. I know for sure a client I worked alongside would agree. 

After working with a long term client they decided to host an event for an up-coming development project that would consist of an industry meet and greet, along with speeches from some rather well known mining industry leaders. As we continued to work on some bigger projects for them they decided to plan the event themselves. After carefully crafting the invitations and sending it out to over 500 potential guests, did they only weeks later realised, they had forgotten to attach an ‘accept’ and ‘decline’ button to the email. Naturally, a week before the event they had 0 idea as to who was attending!

In their moment of panic they rushed to call us for some much needed help to sort out the issue and save the event. As it was too late to recreate the invitations it meant that each person on the invitation list had to be personally called (by myself and two other colleagues) and ticked off if they were attending or not. It was an extremely long and tedious job that could easily have been avoided, saving us time and the client money. Luckily for us, we were well prepared with an up-to-date  healthy database of all their clients so we could start making calls straight away, without wasting time looking for contact details.

The event went ahead and was a success, thankfully. So all ended well, although I believe a lesson should be taken from this.  It’s really easy to forget minor details, especially when you have a million other things to do. Preparation is key. Know what you have to do and make sure you've done it all and done it right. Writing a checklist is an easy way to make sure that you’ve haven't missed anything and always make sure you double check that your work it perfect before sending it out no matter how pressed for time you are, or it can leader to a bigger problem. It’s always better to safe then sorry.

It's Risky

It’s finally here! My fourth and final blog post! The end of my internship has come up so quickly, and no doubt the end of semester will be soon to follow. Exams will be here before we know it, and for those of us in our last semester it will be graduation and then the great unknown! Sounds a bit risky, doesn’t it?

Well lucky its nothing our degree hasn’t prepared us for – particularly since PR is so big on risk management plans (OK that was an even worse joke than my newsfeed worthy one a few weeks ago - I think I’m just going to quit making jokes).

On a serious note however, today I prepared my first risk management plan. I’m not going to lie, these things are a lot more fun than they sound – particularly when being told to plan with the mindset that anything that could possibly go wrong must be included. Today I am planning for the Admedus launch. Admedus is a health care group that develops innovative medicine (think regenerative cell technology and things like that). Admedus is just launching in Perth, and have enlisted Networking WA to help plan and run their launch. The launch will be taking placing at the medical centre itself, however not inside the building but in a marquee in the car park due to the nature of the chemicals and materials inside the building itself (yikes can you imagine the plan I would have had to prepare if the launch was taking place inside the lab?!). Essentially, I had to fill in details about the location of the launch and then brainstorm potential issues and solutions i.e.

Risk: car goes the wrong way and drives into the marquee

Solution: ensure we have ample signs and barricades at the site to prevent cars getting remotely close to the marquee

Not too bad right? Definitely beats data basing to say the least.

Hopefully you’ve all enjoyed your internships as much as I did, and gained some insight into various parts of a PR practitioners job. Good luck with your reports!

Naomi